The case of the 1.4 million missing iPhones — The talk among Apple (AAPL) watchers today is Toni Sacconaghi's dogged pursuit of the 4 million iPhones Steve Jobs claimed to have sold as of Jan. 15, the date of his Macworld keynote speech. — AT&T (T), the iPhone's exclusive U.S. carrier …

Scoble Sells Out — Robert Scoble, who has long been proud of the fact that his popular blog remains free of advertisements or sponsorships, will soon put ads on his site, he told me yesterday. — The change comes as part of his move to Fast Company, who will sell the ads on his behalf and will also be redesigning the site.

Latest Test for DMCA Safe Harbors: Warner Sues SeeqPod — Warner Music Group has sued SeeqPod (complaint, 500k PDF), a “Web 2.0” music search engine (combined with embedable playlists, etc, etc) that has been gaining in popularity in recent months. — This is the latest in a string of lawsuits against Web 2.0 companies.

Double amputee walks again due to Bluetooth — WASHINGTON (CNN) — Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bleill lost both his legs above the knees when a bomb exploded under his Humvee while on patrol in Iraq on October 15, 2006. He has 32 pins in his hip and a 6-inch screw holding his pelvis together.

700 MHz auction ends first week of bidding at $3.7B — Los Angeles generates interest in the fourth round — The Federal Communication Commission's auction of 1,099 wireless licenses in the 700 MHz band headed into an early weekend break having garnered more than $3.7 billion in potential winning bids.

Bill Gates' new project: Farming — DAVOS, Switzerland (CNN) — Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates announced a new direction Friday as he pledged $306 million in grants to develop farming in poor countries, leading the charge for corporate responsibility at a major meeting of business chiefs.

Usability Disaster Story — In December, someone asked me about how many Mono downloads we had per month to estimate the size of Mono users. With software like Mono the download numbers do not mean much, because most of our users get their software through their distribution, package channels or as a bundled executable.

Palm Realizes It's Not Apple; Closes Retail Shops — Over the last decade, plenty of technology hardware companies thought it would make sense to open their own retail shops. Sony, Gateway, Palm and Apple all went down that path. Of that list, only Apple has been able to turn those retail stores into something valuable.

Windows 7: The Anti-Vista? — Even with Windows Vista's one-year anniversary launch just a week away, all that anyone in the tech-enthusiast community seems to want to talk about is Windows 7 (Except for those who are already sick of hearing about 7, as one Windows user characterized himself in a conversation I had yesterday.)

Books that make you dumb — Wikiscanner hacker Virgil Griffth told me a while ago about his latest data mining project, to visualise the relationship between books and SAT scores. Today he released his findings at Booksthatmakeyoudumb. — He does this by cross referencing the 10 …

Making changes — At Google, we're encouraged to move to different groups and learn new skills. I recently transitioned to the Maps team — specifically, to the group that empowers local experts like you to improve your virtual neighborhood on Google Maps.

In-flight Internet: Grounded for life? — If Wi-Fi is available at thousands of Internet cafes on even the most remote beaches in Southeast Asia, why isn't it ubiquitous on airplanes in the United States? — For those travelers who desperately want to know, the answer is that it's nearly here.

Why did colleges stay mum on MPAA stats? — With the Hollywood sign clearly visible from his workplace, John Heidemann was skeptical about what the movie industry was saying about campus piracy. — Heidemann, a researcher in the Information and Science Institute at the University of Southern California …

Anonymous hackers take on the Church of Scientology — What started as a copyright violation claim by the Church of Scientology against the posting of one of its videos to YouTube has resulted in a full on assault by a group calling itself Anonymous. The video, in which Tom Cruise proclaims …